Skeptics claim that charging your EV with grids that use fossil fuel power is just as bad as burning gas. They're wrong. It is one of the most absurd and enduring points made by anti-EV advocates.

Matthew LaPlante doesn’t have to go to a lab to see his research in action. On some mornings, he can just look out his own window in the mountains high above Salt Lake City. After a warm night when the temperature stays above freezing, he’ll wake up and see that the snow level has dropped by inches, revealing more of the aspens he taps for syrup.

“It feels like a monster came and just in the middle of the night, took a bite out of a snowpack,” said LaPlante, a journalist and climate scientist at Utah State University.

So it’s fitting that scientists have started calling these kinds of heat waves, marked by unusually high temperatures in the spring and early summer, “snow eaters.”

LaPlante was part of a recent study, published in the journal Science Advances, that attempted, for the first time, to identify what conditions exactly make for a “snow eater.” Compared to normal warm spells or heat waves, the researchers determined that these events happen when temperatures stay above freezing through both day and night for multiple days, typically three to five. These events can roughly double the rate at which snow melts, causing flooding and making it challenging to manage water resources.

“Snow eaters” appear to be occurring earlier in the year and becoming more widespread in the Western United States as the climate warms. Since the 1850s, the study found, the area affected by snow eaters has increased by an average of about 40,000 square miles per century, and the first snow eater of the season has been arriving about one month earlier per century.

Let everyone who has love care of animals, plants appreciate their presence and share the message to the rest of the world
Here we are are receiving food, water and good luck with environment#@

@environment
@sustainrelease

Environmental defenders, wildlife rescuers and farmers are paying with their lives as Israeli strikes continue across southern Lebanon.

A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.

In a preliminary injunction issued earlier this month, U.S. District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.

The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling — not collected and thrown away — could bear the chasing arrows.

Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court.

The Great Lakes piping plover (Charadrius melodus) likes to live along sandy beaches in, of course, the Great Lakes in North America. In the past, its population is estimated to have been 500 to 800 pairs. But habitat loss, nest destruction, high tides and predators took their toll and the population fell to between 10 and 20 pairs by the 1980s. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service placed the bird on its endangered species list in 1985.

But extinction has been prevented thanks to efforts by various conservation and bird-loving groups as well as governments and land-management agencies bent on bringing the plover population back to its traditional size and range. The Detroit Zoological Society, for instance, partners with volunteers and other agencies to protect these birds and, when necessary, raise them and release them in the wild when ready. The zoo has been working on its Piping Plover Recovery Initiative since 2003 and 88 pairs were counted in 2025. Before the bird can be considered recovered, the count will have to reach at least 150 families, at least half outside of Michigan, where they are now concentrated.

Switzerland is built for winter. Almost all buildings are equipped with heating systems and were designed to maximise exposure to the sun’s rays in colder months.

However, due to climate change, winters are getting milder and heatwaves are growing more frequent and intense. Switzerland is meanwhile among the countries where temperatures are rising fastest. Together with the United Kingdom, it could be set to experience one of the sharpest relative increases in the number of days of uncomfortably high temperatures.

As temperatures rise, the use air conditioning is also on the increase. This summer, sales of portable air conditioners and fans reached record levels in Switzerland. Cooling technologies improve comfort and reduce heat-related deaths, but can also increase pressure on electricity grids, contribute to the urban heat island effect, and raise greenhouse gas emissions.

“Cooling is becoming an increasingly important challenge for both buildings and the electricity system,” Urs-Peter Menti, professor and co-director of the Institute of Building Technology and Energy at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, told Swissinfo.

This trend extends well beyond Switzerland. Electricity demand for cooling is rising sharply worldwide. In European Union countries, energy consumption for cooling doubled between 2018 and 2024. There has also been significant growth in the US and across Asia and the Middle East. Switzerland is one of many countries trying to figure out how to avoid the hazards of a warming planet without contributing to that warming through additional emissions.

Earth's Waters Are Losing Oxygen, and Scientists Want the World to Pay Attention

Key Points

• A Scripps-led review published June 30, 2026 argues aquatic deoxygenation should become the tenth planetary boundary.
• Warming, nutrient pollution, and reduced deep-water ventilation are draining dissolved oxygen from oceans, lakes, and rivers.
• The authors warn current oxygen loss may be approaching irreversible levels within human lifetimes.

Image: Scripps Institution of Oceanography - Underwater Oxygen Loss Threatens Earth’s Stability, Researchers Warn

Oxygen is vanishing from the world's waters. A review paper led by scientists at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, published June 30, 2026 in Limnology and Oceanography, makes the case that this loss is not a side effect of other environmental problems but a planetary-scale crisis in its own right.

The study synthesizes decades of research on what scientists call "aquatic deoxygenation," the decline of dissolved oxygen across oceans, coastal waters, rivers, lakes, and streams. Its central argument: dissolved oxygen conditions should be formally added to the Planetary Boundaries framework, the nine-process model introduced in 2009 to define a safe operating space for humanity.

"The health and stability of our planet depends on the health and stability of aquatic ecosystems, which need oxygen to function normally," said lead author Erica Ferrer, a Scripps alumna now at UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, according to UC San Diego. "This study is designed to elevate the profile of aquatic deoxygenation as a global threat and show that it does not operate in isolation."

Image: ScienceDaily - Earth's waters are quietly running out of oxygen, scientists warn

What Is Driving the Loss

Three forces are responsible. Human-caused warming reduces how much oxygen water can hold. Excess nutrient pollution, largely from agriculture, feeds algal blooms that consume oxygen as they decompose. And changes in ocean circulation are cutting off the supply of oxygenated water to deeper layers, ScienceDaily reported.

The consequences cascade through food webs. Fish, crustaceans, plankton, and the microbes that cycle nutrients all depend on dissolved oxygen. Marine mammals breathe air at the surface but still suffer as their prey relocates or disappears and habitats degrade.

A Tenth Planetary Boundary

The existing nine boundaries include climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, freshwater change, land-use change, chemical pollution, biogeochemical flows, atmospheric aerosol loading, and stratospheric ozone depletion. The review maps how deoxygenation interacts with and modulates all nine of these processes, and identifies four indicators that could be used to define a global oxygen boundary.

Image: Tech Explorist - Oxygen is vanishing from Earth's waters

As Tech Explorist reported, the team concluded: "The present levels of oxygen decline indicate we are nearing a tipping point, past which human-caused Earth-system impacts will be largely irreversible within the span of most people's lives."

Senior author Lisa Levin, a biological oceanographer at Scripps, said the idea for the paper grew out of attending COP25, the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid. "Adding aquatic deoxygenation to the Planetary Boundaries framework will help us understand its impacts on Earth system stability," Ferrer said, per UC San Diego. "Mitigating its impacts represents a critical component of maintaining biodiversity and climate."

Jan Umsonst, commenting on the study on LinkedIn, noted that hydrogen sulfide outgassing from deoxygenated coastal systems and lakes "makes living along the affected coasts a deadly health hazard," calling the feedback loops "massive" across all scales.

The study's eight co-authors span Scripps, UCLA, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. For the full analysis, UC San Diego's coverage provides the most complete summary and links to the original paper.

Sources: UC San Diego, ScienceDaily, Tech Explorist, LinkedIn (Jan Umsonst), eScholarship

In the period leading up to the Second World War, technological advances were rapidly redefining everyday life, including the widespread use of a new class of superchemicals that promised to solve all our household problems. Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are a class of synthetic chemicals known as “forever chemicals”, which have quietly infiltrated our daily lives.

A new report from the Deep Sea Mining Campaign says a threat tied to seabed mining has gone almost entirely unexamined: radioactivity.

The report, released June 30 as the International Seabed Authority met to debate mining regulations, points to a 2023 study by researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany that found alpha-emitting radioactive isotopes concentrated on the outer layer of polymetallic nodules, the potato-sized mineral deposits scattered across the Pacific floor that mining companies want to extract.

That study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, measured radium-226 on nodule surfaces at levels that, in some cases, exceeded Germany's radiation safety limit by a factor of 100 to 1,000. Nodules stored in poorly ventilated spaces also released radon gas at concentrations that could climb well above international exposure limits, the study found. During metal processing, some of the radioactivity, including actinium-227, could become further concentrated in the rare earth elements extracted from the nodules. The AWI team said it plans to study whether nodules from other parts of the deep sea carry similar radioactivity and how to weigh the ecological, economic and social risks that follow.

The Deep Sea Mining Campaign report does not claim that mining has already caused ecological damage from radioactivity. Instead, it lays out what its authors call a scientific blind spot: No peer-reviewed studies have examined how radioactive material released by mining would move through marine food chains or what doses marine life would actually absorb.

The plan to bury carbon under remote Indiana farmland is supposed to be a slam dunk for the climate, according to its supporters—all generously funded by US tax dollars.

But as far as Melissa Harrison and some other residents of Clymers, Indiana, are concerned, it just might be the end of their town. “This is our place,” she says. Generations of her family are buried in the cemetery, and she is raising her five grandchildren in one of several dozen white-clapboard homes among corn fields and industrial plants serving the farming industry.

Now a local ethanol plant has spearheaded a project to bury vast stores of carbon deep in the geologic formation that runs under the town and surrounding farms.

The government subsidies for the plan, which is supposed to help prevent global heating, are so generous that companies all over the country have been rushing to get permission for similar projects.

But residents around some of these carbon sequestration projects are organizing to stop them, making Clymers an epicenter of emerging national tensions around these projects.

While international climate monitors say carbon sequestration projects could be secondary tools to help contain global warming, they also say the main focus must be on urgent and deep cuts to fossil fuels. Some environmental groups question the benefits of carbon sequestration and are concerned it could delay the transition to clean energy and pose risks to surrounding communities.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A proposed legal settlement with the U.S. government would require the Keystone Pipeline system’s operator to pay a $26.9 million civil penalty over a major oil spill in Kansas in December 2022 and spend about $40 million more to prevent future accidents.

With some still unable to accept humanity’s role in climate chaos, we tackle common misconceptions and deceptions

I will not say this is a silver lining. War should not be the driver for this change. However, here we are.

I will not say this is a silver lining. War should not be the driver for this change. However, here we are.

A heat wave scorched much of the eastern United States over the Fourth of July weekend, bringing extreme temperatures that caused roads to buckle, snarling holiday traffic.

Nowhere was this more dramatic than on a stretch of concrete-paved Interstate 97 south of Baltimore, where one lane of traffic suddenly warped, forcing its closure. A city street in Chicago experienced a similar, though less dramatic, pavement failure, and several state departments of transportation warned motorists to watch for additional heat-related road damage.

Scientists say such heat waves are becoming more common and more intense. Climate change is driving more extreme temperatures, along with heavier rainfall. Both can contribute to pavements expanding and cracking, making roads temporarily impassable as they await expensive repairs. It raises the question: Are the nation's roads ready to meet the challenge of a warmer, wetter future?

Civil engineers say the answers aren't entirely straightforward.

I took some time to build on a post I had here, and expand it into a broader discussion on climate impacts. I focus on the Happiest Place on Earth as it sweltered in near-deadly wet bulb conditions, AC failed, and asphalt liquefied. I discuss how the area is built for a climate past, still relies on old systems to design and grow, and what it's impact is now.

Family ties to Alsace go back five hundred years. Two generations ago some moved to the US to avoid the, let's say troubles, between the region and France after WW1. Those that are there reported their gardens simply shriveling. Unbearable heat they only escaped in their cellars. So much smog and traffic because people were trying to a) get into AC in their car and B) get to the mountains.

These are the ripple effects often underreported. 1,000 deaths of the exposed and the elderly is bad. Quite. But there is so much more danger and disruption than we encounter in the reporting.